Sexual Politics and Female Sexuality in Gish Jen’s Typical American

In Typical American(1991), Jen tells the stories of Ralph Chang and his intellectual family aspiring to make it into America’s middle and upper classes in the 1950s. She portrays women as resistant to sexism at home and in society. In this paper, I address the stories of women, namely, Helen, Ralph’s wife, and, Theresa, his elder sister, pertaining to their relationship with men in striving for their American dreams of individual freedom and autonomy. I argue that through the conflicts between men and women, Jen presents a tension between the self and family, which symbolizes the tension between her birth cultural value of family unity and her adopted cultural value of individual freedom. Calling for bridging the two cultures, Jen conveys that those who ignore one culture or the other are doomed.